Environmental Theater Project Is 'A Jazz Funeral For The Land'

"Cry You One," collaborative performance piece about land and preservation, will be performed eight times during the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven.

"Cry You One," collaborative performance piece about land and preservation, will be performed eight times during the International Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven. (Handout)

CHRISTOPHER ARNOTTSpecial to the Courant

A nuanced dialogue about vanishing land at the Festival of Arts & Ideas

It's common to say that ensemble theater projects "grow organically" out of shared tastes and concerns for the subject matter. "Cry You One" takes that organic ideal to an extreme. The project is a collaboration between two New Orleans arts organizations, Mondo Bizarro and ArtSpot Productions. The groups took an environmental theme — the vanishing wetlands area in their native Louisiana — and developed a multidisciplinary performance style to encompass all the aspects of it.

To dramatize both the urgency of the topic but also to give a sense of hope, and celebrate the beauty of nature, "Cry You One" takes on the form of a procession or a pageant, with music and movement and scripted text. There are seven performers and a structure that allows for a lot of interaction with the audience. The full experience, which involves "walking and standing for extended periods of time," lasts three hours.

"It's a human-built idea grafted upon a natural environment," says Nick Slie, who co-conceived the event and also acts in it.

"We recognize that we're telling a universal story," says Slie. "But specificity is what makes it memorable." "Cry You One" has been performed in Vermont (post-Hurricane Irene), Texas and Kentucky. The New Haven performances — eight of them, one of the longest runs the show has had — will take place at Maltby Lakes on Derby Avenue, where New Haven borders Orange and West Haven. The troupe made four visits to Connecticut in order to adapt the work for this area.

"Cry You One" has activist intentions — "We're losing land faster than any place in the known world," Slie declares. But he's aware how complicated the issue of environmental preservation can be.

"I have family members in the oil industry. When we do a project, we want to think about everybody it engages. We want to have the most complicated and nuanced dialogue we can have."

"I kept having this notion," Slie says, "of the last days of Louisiana, which ended with it floating into the sea. This is a jazz funeral for the land. We're telling a story, from the perspective of the land."

CRY YOU ONE, part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, is performed at 2 p.m. on June 13, 14, 16, 20 and 21; and at 4 p.m. on June 17, 18 and 19 at Maltby Lakes, 585 Derby Ave., West Haven. $55 weekends, $45 weekdays. artidea.org